If you're regularly watching this Vancouver Canucks team play, you know it's impossible to escape the impression that there's something just a little bit off.
It's a certain volatility, perhaps. A flatness of vibe. A lack of consistent intensity, especially compared to what this group demonstrated last season.
In spurts, undeniably, this Canucks team has performed well. They've been downright exceptional on the road, for example.
We know that this group is capable of hitting an extremely high level on any given night, which we saw this week when the Canucks trounced the defending Stanley Cup champions on Thursday. Their floor performances, however, seem significantly lower this season, something we also saw over the weekend when they were completely flummoxed on Saturday by a deeply mid iteration of the Boston Bruins.
Some of Vancouver's defensive gains, so astonishing last season, have dissipated. Where Vancouver prevented shots and high-quality scoring chances at an elite level last year, its work rate and defensive solidity have been far less pronounced and remarkable. This is still a Rick Tocchet team that's difficult to break down, but its lack of consistency has left it closer to above-average defensively than elite so far.
The Canucks' high-end skill, meanwhile, headlined by Quinn Hughes' continued ascension as one of the most impactful skaters in the sport, gives them an often decisive advantage on most nights. While they seemed to be making strides as an attacking unit early in the season, their shot rate, inner-slot shot rate and scoring chance rate have been compromised recently by a preponderance of key absences.
That's just what we can measure and observe. Beyond the quantitative hockey side of the equation, there's that sense of something being amiss that goes beyond on-ice performance.
The idea of a team that can "start to become individuals" when the going gets rough, as Tocchet suggested his first power-play unit can be prone to on Saturday night. A team that has "three or four or five guys that are struggling to get emotionally invested in the game."
We're still pretty confident the Canucks are a very good team, and perhaps more than that. A team that could emerge as a sleeping giant in the Western Conference mix, an outcome that should surprise nobody if that's precisely how this plays out over the next several months.
At some point, however, we need to see this group's form actually match those expectations. And then be sustained.
Let's open the notebook and dive into some key UFA math and why this week could quietly be a high-stakes one.
We're reaching a critical moment in the hockey calendar.
Later this week -- at midnight on Dec. 19 -- Vancouver's roster will be frozen, subject to a few exceptions outlined in the collective bargaining agreement for the NHL's annual "holiday roster freeze." For a period of just over a week -- until Dec. 28 -- the roster will be fixed.
Perhaps the Canucks can execute a move to shake up their roster before the freeze, but it's getting pretty late, especially given how infrequently we've seen in-season trades executed in the first couple months of the season over the past couple of years.
The trade market has been relatively more active this season -- NHL teams have combined to execute 11 trades since the puck dropped on the 2024-25 regular season -- than it was at this time last year. Last season, NHL teams combined to execute nine trades between the start of the regular season and Dec. 15, which doesn't seem like a significant change on a year-over-year basis, but the raw numbers are deceptive. The Canucks executed four of those nine trades last season, juking the numbers somewhat and making the overall trade market seem more active than it was.
Regardless of whether or not Vancouver slips in a trade before the roster freeze, the early part of the calendar year has historically been an active time for the Canucks during the Jim Rutherford and Patrik Allvin era of hockey operations leadership. It's often early that the Canucks have redoubled their efforts to extend key players -- from Andrei Kuzmenko to Bo Horvat to Elias Pettersson -- and in back-to-back Januarys, the club has jumped the trade deadline marketplace to execute a massive deal (the Horvat trade in 2023, and the Elias Lindholm trade in 2024).
The critical nature of this moment was alluded to by Rutherford in his "After Hours" appearance on Saturday.
"From the front-office point of view, we're at around the 30-game mark and we have to start to make decisions," Rutherford said. "We talk every day about how we make the team better and what changes we might have to make, and we're at that period now."
On the other side of the holiday freeze, as Canucks hockey operations hold their annual midseason meetings, the club will start to get down to brass tacks on making some key decisions. And the start of that process will likely revolve around how Vancouver should approach major decisions concerning its own pending unrestricted free agents, with players like Brock Boeser, Pius Suter and Kevin Lankinen the most important players on expiring deals.
"Right now we're evaluating (Boeser's) situation," Rutherford said. "The key is going to be what that contract looks like, what the term looks like, all of those things. It's like all contracts. The player is going to have a different opinion than what the team has and we'll continue to watch this really close."
While it took this front office a few years to untangle the serious cap mess it inherited, and while there are still bumps in the road to weather in the years ahead, under Rutherford and Allvin, the Canucks have been solidly disciplined about managing term for depth contributors and avoiding the big mistake (albeit sometimes by the skin of their teeth). As a result, they are positioned with a solid amount of flexibility going into trade deadline season and could likely afford to retain all of their key free agents if they elected to.
Let's lay out the basic math before we delve further into the decisions facing the Canucks in the weeks and months ahead. Here's how Vancouver's balance sheet for 2024-25 sits currently. For the purposes of this table, we're excluding any one-way contracts that can be buried without penalty in the AHL.
That math includes the following 15 players, who are signed through at least the 2024-25 season:
While we should proceed cautiously, the league is currently projecting at least a $92.4 million upper limit for the 2025-26 season. There is widespread optimism that the cap could grow even more dramatically than that pending negotiations between the league and the NHLPA.
If we assume the upper limit will fall somewhere in the mid-$90 million range, Vancouver could have as much as $20 million in cap space to work with in filling out its roster with just eight players (and that's without making a single trade to reallocate any inefficient money). With that level of flexibility, the Canucks could opt to retain Boeser at a Travis Konecny-like $9 million cap hit, extend Pius Suter at a $3.5-4.5 million clip, sign Lankinen at the market rate for a 1B-type starter and still have some space left over to flesh out their depth.
The choices they will face in determining how to proceed with their pending free agents are difficult, but they're not nearly as gutwrenching as some choices they've had to navigate over the past few years. There is meaningful flexibility for them to keep their most important players and still take a major swing to upgrade the defence corps, either during the season or in the upcoming offseason.
What's perhaps most interesting for us to monitor in the short term, however, is how the decisions on Vancouver's various unrestricted free agents might shape its actions ahead of the trade deadline. While the Canucks kept some expiring veteran players around for their playoff run last season, Rutherford and Allvin have generally been careful to mine assets for expiring UFA players with whom they've been unable to extend -- with Horvat, Luke Schenn and Tyler Motte among the most prominent examples.
There is no rest for the wicked and no time for the Canucks to gradually find their game.
Whatever is ailing them, coming off of one of their most troubling performances of the season on Saturday night, they will need to shake it off. After all, they're entering what promises to be their most important week of the season so far.
While the Canucks have dealt with a myriad of injuries, illnesses, personal leaves and other tricky issues throughout this season, they've generally performed to a high enough level and rightly earned the benefit of the doubt about their status as a relatively safe playoff team in the Western Conference. The question we've been more preoccupied with is whether or not this team is a contender. The Canucks' ability to qualify for the playoffs for a second consecutive year has largely been an unchallenged assumption.
It will take a lot for that to shift significantly, but this is quietly a critical week. When the Canucks host the Colorado Avalanche on Monday, they'll do so as the seventh-ranked team in the Western Conference by point percentage. And the Avalanche are right on their heels in ninth.
A regulation loss to Colorado on Monday wouldn't quite be enough for the two teams to flip places in the standings, but it would leave them just about level with one another. Vancouver will then face Utah, the 10th-place team in the Western Conference by point percentage, on Wednesday night.
The young, unnamed upstarts in Utah have run red hot over the past few weeks. They've also managed the sort of auspicious five-on-five profile through the first 30 games of the season that often hints at a second-half breakout. The Canucks will then face the Vegas Golden Knights on the second leg of a back-to-back, which represents a very difficult spot against a bona fide elite team.
The Canucks have more depth than Colorado and a higher ceiling than a team like Utah, but for a variety of reasons, they haven't been able to build themselves a cushion in the wild-card race just yet. Accordingly, they will likely need to bank four or five of the six points up for grabs across their next three games. If they don't, they may yet find themselves in a high-stakes wild-card playoff race with limited margin for error as we open the 2025 portion of the hockey calendar.